Standalone sound decoders


Sounds like a fairly serious upgrade - you may want to consider scraping the bachmann for a Kato, BLI or Athearn Steam engine that comes equipped with DCC/sound already.

Anyway, regardless of what you choose - it will be interesting to see the end result of your upgrades.
 
All but the jingle bells part, I have done this before but on an old 2-8-0 Mikado. Seems like it was a much larger engine than this one. I'm curious to see what kind of space I have to work with and if a droo in decoder can be used.
 
I had a DCC-On-Board 0-6-0 from Bachmann. The cheap 'decoder', if one can apply that term to the piece of junk Bachmann used in that locomotive line, rapidly gave up the ghost. I replaced it with an N-scale Digitrax decoder first, then decided I wanted sound. So I used a Digitrax SDN136PS decoder.
The thread I made to document the process is here:
modelrailroadforums.com

Bachmann 0-6-0 switcher #4439

I have 4 Bachmann 0-6-0 switchers, 2 are DCC On-Board models, and 2 are straight DC models. I have two each of black paint scheme and passenger service greyhound scheme. Someday I may convert the two DC loco's to DCC, but not for now. The greyhound DCC decoder went belly-up so I'll have to...
modelrailroadforums.com modelrailroadforums.com

Along the way I also modified the locomotive to more closely resemble the 4439, the last steam locomotive in service in the Los Angeles basin.
It was a lot of work, but it runs and sound pretty good!
 
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